Prof. Wagner on KBS video, 1985

 

Recently, one of my colleagues discovered a recording of my graduate school advisor, Edward W. Wagner, on a 1985 KBS program. He was interviewed about his work and the development of the Korean program at Harvard. I was so, so delighted to watch the video and see a younger, vibrant professor and friend. My last memory of him was when I visited him at the senior care center when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer's. Now, to see him as a young sixty-year-old, a man just a little older than the man who taught me Korean history in graduate seminars, brought back a flood of happy memories.

Professor Wagner was always cheerful. In the interview, he would chuckle as he made typical self-effacing comments, as he drew irony out of the question given to him, as he found an interesting twist to the discussion at hand. Wagner was intelligent, first and foremost. And he was diligent. These traits all showed up in the TV interview.

I was again impressed with his Korean language ability. He would speak slowly and clearly and above all, precisely — reminding me of the classes where we would burrow down deeply into the sentences at hand, parsing out the meaning and the nuance of each word in context. We studied historical texts and literary texts. It was a joy beyond measure to really study and learn the language in its depth.

He was asked about "the" project that had consumed much of his late career research — the "munkwa" project — a thorough evaluation of the 15,000 men who passed the munkwa exam, the high civil service exam over the 500 years of the Joseon dynasty. He spoke of the time of his research as a time when computers were first making their appearance. He had the foresight to see that using a computer could capture all this data and make sense of it — to see patterns and connections that would be hard to find without a computer. In addition to the 15,000 who passed the exam, the examination rosters also listed additional information that helped to frame and describe the elite structure of the last dynasty, such as the principal's father, brothers, residence, "bogan," age and a few other data. These he would input into the computer and thereby create a huge database that described the elite structure of the society.

He had questions to ask the data, and from the mass of data, new questions arose. For example, the residence data told us which areas saw more success than other areas and which areas were under-represented. The age data told us that the youngest to pass the exam was only 17 years old, and the oldest was 77. The rosters listed in any given year all those who passed, the standard was 33, but some special exams had smaller numbers, as few as seven. Regular exams were given every three years, but the court found a special reason to host an exam once a year and sometimes, seldom, twice a year.

Linking the exam passers together were marriage relationship which led Wagner into the "jokbo" — the genealogy books that marked the upper class of Korea. Wagner was known in the popular society for this secondary area, more than for his work on those who passed the exams. And he did know Korean genealogy. In the TV interview, he talked about how Korean jokbo have changed over time.

He spoke of the evolution of the Korean jokbo over the Joseon dynasty. The first published jokbo was the Andong Kwon jokbo of 1476. There were genealogical records in fragmented pieces found in his historical records and personal records, but the first attempt to publish the records of an extended family group was that by the Kwon family. Jokbo is a synopsis of society at any given point — a jokbo is a kind of "photograph" of what families looked like at any given time. Wagner pointed out that in this first jokbo there were no "adoptions" that became so typical in later jokbo, and rather than patching in a member of the extended family for every man who did not have a son, this early jokbo would simply indicate "no heir." In later generations, one would seldom see such a notation.

Wagner pointed out that the Munhwa Yu jokbo, published in 1535, had 120 adoptions. The Kwon record consisted of three volumes with about 10,000 names, but the Yu jokbo was in ten volumes with 46,000 names. Only 120 adoptions show the ideal of providing an heir for the sake of performing Confucian ceremonies for one's ancestors was an ideal that was just starting to grow. In later generations, nineteenth century. Fully 15 percent of any jokbo included those who had an adopted heir. The jokbo is a measure of the growth of Confucian devotion in Korea.

These are just a few of the points professor Wagner discussed in the 1985 KBS interview. It was a joy for me to watch and subsequently, I have featured portions of the video in my own YouTube channel — all tributes to a great scholar.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.